111–120 of 194 posts
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Denmark taxes car purchases at 150%. I think Singapore does something similar.
Denmark taxes lower income rural residents disproportionally. Singapore is a city state.
I wasn't commenting on the equality of the Danish tax system, or the status of Singapore.
I was just saying taxing car purchases is another idea to disincentivize cars.
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SUVs bonnets are the height of my 6 year old, she can easily be out of visibility, as there are plenty of non SUVs around I can see it's not the case for the them. The exhaust is not at just the right height for kids in buggies when you cross the road.
Yet in the countryside, the higher driving position gives better visibility, with grass verges etc blocking the view around corners. That is what I see from my 20 year old non status symbol 4x4. Should I be taxed because my car is inappropriate for London, where it will never go?
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I'd argue all of the cars you listed get you as far as you have gasoline. Even with room for at least one passenger and luggage. What's your argument? And public transport cannot always replace individual mobility. E.g. transporting big things or sick people is not really an option on public transport
If you argue that you'd be a liar. They just don't. They all get about 200 miles real world, my (£10,000 cheaper !) hatchback, petrol with a 55 L tank and much more interior space than any of those, can push 400. Why say things that aren't true? People aren't going to be fooled.
That is to say, not 400? Why say things that aren't true? People aren't going to be fooled.
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They exist for a reason. Some people have more to haul than just groceries.
Agreed. The kids won't drive themselves to soccer practice!
Suddenly I was looking at bike rack systems worth more than some of my previous cars.
It’s a station wagon though. Still car shaped, SUV cargo space inside.
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Denmark taxes lower income rural residents disproportionally. Singapore is a city state.
Not sure what that has to do with anything... I wasn't commenting on the equality of the Danish tax system, or the status of Singapore. I was just saying taxing car purchases is another idea to disincentivize cars.
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Even better tax based on weight to number of permanent seats ratio. 7 seaters for larger families shouldn't be penalised, but structure it so manufactures can't just throw a couple of fold down seats in the back of a large SUV as a work around. But everything about road tax needs to change with the reduction of fuel duty due to electric cars. The public haven't seen this coming yet, but it's going to be a difficult t…
No, why should I subsidize somebody else's children any more than I should subsidize somebody else's ego booster? Ignoring the fact that this wouldn't even work because SUVs would just get extra seats to work around the tax structure. 7-seat private buses wear down the road just as much as private tanks, so tax them equally.
Whether societal family planning should, at all, play into road taxes is quite the question, but it's widely accepted that society should bother to educate its children.
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Class... is a tricky definition here in the UK. For instance, the richest person I will ever know drives a crappy wee Japanese hatchback, whilst SUVs are often high-monthly fee status symbols for people who could spend their money 'better' elsewise. shrug
I'm in my 40's and the number of my friends who've done exactly that. We have the friends who spend their disposable on status and the friends who spend their disposable on Holidays (I'm vaca-class).
(I'm posting this from an exotic holiday in the Indian Ocean, my cousin lives in Essex and has a hire-purchase SUV.)
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> Why weight in particular? Kinetic energy (thus fuel consumption and particles from brakes) and road wear scale with weight. It's not perfect but it's most of the way there. > Two arguments here: 1. SUVs are already taxed on weight indirectly - they consume more fuel which is heavily taxed (50+% in most of Europe). This does not solve the issue with externalities: fuel cost absolutely does not offset the cost to soc…
Road wear scales with the fourth power of weight over an axle. Most fuel consumption is about overcoming drag rather than accelerating so you should expect it to scale with something like cross-sectional area, say weight^2/3, though making cars longer adds weight without much drag and making them boxier can add drag without much weight. I don’t think fuel taxes are particularly good as indirect taxes on the externali…
Cars are not getting more axles, even SUVs, so this is a constant multiplicative factor. I would be happy with a tax that scales as the fourth power of the mass, no problem. That would be actually quite dissuasive very quickly. Though even a linear scaling would be an improvement over the current situation.
> Most fuel consumption is about overcoming drag rather than accelerating so you should expect it to scale with something like cross-sectional area, say weight^2/3, though making cars longer adds weight without much drag and making them boxier can add drag without much weight.
Right. We should ideally account for aerodynamics and drag factors, which also keep getting worse year after year. One does not preclude the other.
> I don’t think fuel taxes are particularly good as indirect taxes on the externalities one might care about
I entirely agree.
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None of those cars (toys) get you very far outside of the city. And inside of the city we've got public transportation.
I'd argue all of the cars you listed get you as far as you have gasoline. Even with room for at least one passenger and luggage. What's your argument? And public transport cannot always replace individual mobility. E.g. transporting big things or sick people is not really an option on public transport